From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

891 Creating a metadata template in Bridge

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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891 Creating a metadata template in Bridge

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques, The Stuck At Home Edition. No crew, just you and me. I like to think of it as Deke's Techniques one-on-one. Today I'm going to show you how to create the perfect metadata template. So imagine that everything you put out there, whether it's a photograph, a drawing, or a multipage design, identifies you as its author, marks the work as copyrighted, names you or your company as the copyright holder, and directs people to your website, which is great, but the way it works by default it can end up messing up a few properties, including a couple of creation dates. In other words, it changes too much metadata. What I'm about to show you avoids those pitfalls and it works inside Adobe Bridge, Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop. Four powerhouse programs, one simple solution. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so we're going to start things off inside Adobe Bridge, at which point I've got this file right here called harborseal.dng, so it's a raw DNG file. It looks like this, for what it's worth, and in order to fill the screen with the image I just tapped the space bar. Anyway, I'll go ahead and hit the escape key so that you can see that I've applied some development and crop settings inside camera raw, as indicated by these icons in the top right corner of the thumbnail. I've also assigned some metadata in the form of the author name, copyright, and website, and to see what that looks like you want to go up to the file menu and choose the file info command, which also exists, by the way, inside Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. So all four of these programs, including Bridge, include this command, and it looks absolutely the same. And so notice that I'm looking at the contents of the basic panel, and I've set the author to my name. I've gone ahead and set the copyright status to copyrighted. I've entered some copyright information right here, and I've also entered the URL for my website, deke.com. All right, so let's say I want to assign all of this metadata to every single image, or piece of artwork, or design, that I put out there. Then you want to drop down to this guy right here, template folder, it's truncated, and if you can't see it, by the way, then you can go ahead and resize the dialogue box. In any event I'll click on that guy and then choose export, and this'll allow me to export the metadata as an independent XMP file that I can assign to other files in the future. And just so we can keep track of it, I'm going to leave it set to the name of that image right there, harbor seal, and then I'll just go ahead and click the save button in order to save off that XMP file. All right, I want you to notice one other thing right here. Notice the creation date is set to November 5th of the year 2019, just remember that, because that's an important bit of information that you don't want to lose. We also have the date that the file was last modified. All right, so just remember November 5th, 2019. I'm going to cancel out because I don't want to make any changes to the metadata. That will still maintain that exported file, by the way, and now I'll go ahead and enter this folder right here, Antarctica 2020, which contains a bunch of additional raw image files that I shot in Antarctica. Now these don't have to be raw images, by the way, or images at all. Any kind of file that you create can include metadata. So I'll just go ahead and select this guy right here, and then I'll press control + I, or command + I on a Mac. I want you to notice that the creation date for this file is February 10th of the year 2020, so about three months later. Also notice that all these fields are blank and the copyright status is set to unknown. All right, I want to go ahead and assign that XMP file that I just created, so I'll click on template folder once again and then choose harbor seal, at which point you'll see these import options. You can clear all the existing properties and replace them with template properties. Obviously that would be madness. You don't want to wreck the file. You can keep the original metadata but replace matching properties from the panel, which may seem like a good idea, and so I'll go ahead and click OK. Notice it goes ahead and adds the author information as well as the copyright status and notice and the URL. However, it also messes up the creation date, which is now set to November 5th of the year 2019, which is absolutely wrong. The thing is you're probably not even going to notice that because you'll be so happy that you got your author and copyright information in there, and I must admit, I, for one, did not notice this for years. So I've been messing us a bunch of files over time, at which point all you have to do is click OK in order to do the damage. And notice up here in the edit menu the undo command is dimmed. All right, so what's the solution? Well, one thing you can do is select a different file, like so, and then go to the file menu and choose the file info command, and then go ahead and once again choose harbor seal right there, and this time select the final option: Keep original metadata but append matching properties from the template, and then click OK, at which point the creation date is still February 10th, 2020, which is great. So I'll just go ahead and click OK. A problem arises, however, if you select and modify multiple files here inside Bridge. So let's go ahead and say I select these two, so I'm going to click on one, shift-click on the other, and then again go to the file menu and choose the file info command, and then I'll go ahead and once again choose harbor seal as my metadata template, keep original metadata but append, instead of replace, the matching properties from the template, click OK, and now we're seeing all this good stuff right here, but also creation date is set to multiple values. It's not actually true. I'm just going to click OK so I can show you what happens if I now return to the file menu and choose the file info command. Both files now have a creation date of November 5th, 2019, which again is absolutely wrong. So what do you do about that problem? Well, there's the Adobe certified solution here inside Bridge, and then there's another workaround that I'll show you in a followup movie. But first I'm going to go back to the folder that contains the harbor seal there. I'll go ahead and select it, and then I'll go to the tools menu and choose create metadata template. And that will allow me to select the individual attributes that I want to modify. So instead of doing a big dump of all the metadata that Bridge sees, I'll just go ahead and select creator, which is set to me, then I'll scroll down to date created and I'll just select that data and get rid of it and then tab down. Now what's going to happen is you will have selected that attribute. You don't want to, so just deselect it. Don't really have to get rid of it before you deselect it, but it makes me feel less nervous about things, and then I'll go ahead and turn on copyright notice and copyright status. Now you may notice what's missing here is the URL, in my case deke.com, it's just not here. All right, now I'm going to scroll down to this item, camera data exif, and notice that I've got that bad data in there once again. I'm going to select it and get rid of it. As soon as I press the tab key, however, I go ahead and select that attribute, go ahead and turn it off, and so we should just have three properties selected, as we're seeing down here at the bottom of the dialogue box, then click save. And actually I made a mistake there. I'm going to return to the tools menu and choose create metadata. Notice we have this template name option right here, which I left set to untitled. So presumably you'd want to go ahead and change that name before you click the save button, but I've already made that mistake. And so what I'm going to do is just double-click on that Antarctica 2020 folder again, and then I'll grab these files right here. I'll click on this first one in the second row, at least in my case, and shift-click on this guy so that I have a total of four files selected, and then you could go to the tools menu and choose append metadata followed by untitled, that's one way to work. The other is to just go back to the file info command, which I can get here in Bridge by pressing control + I, or command + I on a Mac, and then I'd go down to template folder and choose untitled. Very bad name for a metadata template, but still, that's what I got. I'll go ahead and select this final option once again and then click OK. We're still seeing creation and modification dates that have multiple values, but notice if I click OK to accept that change and then I'll go ahead and select any one of these files and press control + I, or command + I on a Mac, you can see that the creation date has survived. It's still set to February 10th of the year 2020, which is the actual accurate information. The one downside is that I don't have my copyright info URL because it wasn't saved along with that metadata template file. And so the moral of the story is rather than clicking on template folder and choosing export from inside the file info dialogue box, whether you're working in Bridge or Photoshop or Illustrator or InDesign, the preferred method, I'll cancel out here, is to go up to the tools menu and choose the create metadata template command here inside Adobe Bridge. All right, now if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning I have a followup movie in which I show you how to maintain a lean, mean metadata machine using nothing more than a text editor. If you're looking forward to next week I'll be showing you how to use my favorite new feature in Photoshop 2020 to create this fantastical, otherworldly, selectively stretched panorama. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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